A Critical Evaluation of the Meaning of Quality in Education

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We do have to ensure that what takes place in the classroom is of paramount importance. However, whilst I acknowledge that the lessons must be motivating and cognitively engaging and new knowledge must be built on what students already know we have to take into consideration the quality of learners that we get. School systems work with the children who come into them. The quality of children’s lives before beginning formal education greatly influences the kind of learners they can be. Many elements go into making a quality learner, including health, early childhood experiences and home support.

Relative to both girls and boys, parents, educators and researchers express important concerns about teachers who create an unsafe environment for students either through ignorance of children’s rights or by exploitation. It is indeed true that teacher behaviours affect the quality of the learning environment since learning cannot take place when the basic needs of survival and self-protection are threatened. However, well-managed schools and classrooms contribute to educational quality. Parents, students, teachers and administrators should agree upon school and classroom rules and policies, and these should be clear and understandable (UNICEF, 2000).

Glatthorn & Jailall, (2000) are researchers who have found that research on educational practices and projections about future needs in society contribute to current understanding of the structure of school curriculum. It is their belief that in general, curriculum should emphasize deep rather than broad coverage of important areas of knowledge, authentic and contextualized problems of study, and problem-solving that stresses skills development as well as knowledge acquisition. This is similar to what Schweisfurth (2014) opines about the relevancy of the curriculum. Glatthorn & Jailall, (2000) also said that curriculum should also provide for individual differences, closely coordinate and selectively integrate subject matter, and focus on results or standards and targets for student learning.

Assessment is very critical to learning outcomes. However, how and what we test must be in keeping with what is taught. Colby (2000) noted that teachers and educational systems continue to rely almost exclusively on traditional paper-and-pencil tests of factual knowledge that tend to promote rote memorization rather than higher order thinking skills. This supports the view of Schweisfurth (2014) with regards to assessment as well as that of Didacus Jules (2011) who noted, “If we say that the purpose of Caribbean education is to produce the Ideal Caribbean Person and that this person should have the ability to learn, to be, to do and to live together, then our assessment processes must reflect these competencies and attributes. Assessment can no longer simply be a test of academic ability or retention of knowledge; it must attest that the candidate demonstrates the knowledge, skills and competencies reflective of the total person. As an educator, I also believe that assessment must be meaningful rather than one which seeks a regurgitation of facts with no real life application.

Yusuf Sayed and Rashid Ahmed’s (2015) article “Education quality, and teaching and learning in the post-2015 education agenda , focuses on the UNESCO post-2015 position paper and the Muscat Global Education meeting agreement in April 2015. These are two significant policy documents as they verify the existing global education discourse on education and the development agenda and reflect the broad consultations and thinking reflected in the thematic consultations. These policy documents also are vital as they seek to clarify and secure the focus on the Education for All goals within a future post-2015 development agenda.

The authors argue that while potentially broad conceptualizations of quality emerge from these texts, quality is still being defined as literacy and numeracy and still being constrained by what can be measured. They believe that while teachers are identified as crucial to the quality agenda, there is still a failure to engage more broadly with teaching and learning as well as the diverse contexts of teaching and learning. In this regard I concur with their deductions. They opine that teacher agency, as foreseen in the post-2015 agenda, is not a realistic possibility nor is agency possible when faced with numerous and conflicting demands subject to narrow accountability measures. They believe that if teachers are to be included in the post-2015 agenda there will be need for increased and more deliberate investments in education. It will also require rethinking the macroeconomic models that structure teacher salaries in low-income countries (ActionAid, 2007).

They conclude that the language of these documents and much of the discourse about the post-2015 agenda is, at one level, both a list of needed items and a ‘to-do’ list. They cited King and Palmer (2013) who refer to this situation as presenting more ideas and ‘must-haves’ than concrete, evidence-based suggestions. For them one danger of the vision articulated for the post-2015 education agenda is that it could mean all things to all people and therefore the future challenge is to clearly define this vision.

They believe that:

- 0n-going consultations and efforts to engage with the evidence should help. Consultation with teachers and their representatives in particular, is essential for any post-2015 agenda that has quality teaching and learning at its heart.

- A tension clearly exists between process and outcomes and the extent to which the quality agenda is still being shaped by what can be easily measured.

- It is imperative that what is measured as learning is comprehensive and does not delegitimize important aims of education such as citizenship.

- There is a need to balance the setting of ambitious targets that may not be reached, with narrower but more achievable targets, especially in light of the unfinished agenda learning.

- The post-2015 education agenda, whilst containing a welcome target on teachers that represents, at some level, a substantive advance in the current global education discourse, needs to pay more attention to teacher pedagogy.

- It is imperative that quality for the post-2015 agenda continues to be framed as the search for social justice and moves beyond a simplistic input– output model characteristic of human capital approaches.

This article although a comparative analysis of the two policy papers raises some crucial points especially as it relates to teachers and the teaching learning process with which I concur. Quality education requires quality teachers. There is increasing evidence

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